Toshiba Satellite C55D-B5319 15.6 inch Laptop Review

Toshiba Satellite C55D-B5319 is a low cost, light duty but decent 15.6 inch laptop with the entry level AMD E1-2100 processor that offers modest performance that is sufficient for simple daily office and multimedia tasks and priced accordingly. Toshiba is a good brand for computers and as long as you won’t be playing demanding games on it or do a lot of multitasking and need the computer for web browsing, word processing, video watching, song listening and light gaming, it should be a reasonable one to consider.

Toshiba Satellite comes with the dual core AMD E1-2100 accelerated processor (1MB Cache) at 1.0GHz speed with no turbo boost or hyper threading so the speed stays at 1GHz and 2 cores handle 2 threads, 4GB DDR3L SDRAM at 1600MHz that is not user upgradeable and you’re limited to what is installed by the factory, 500GB SATA HDD at 5400rpm spindle speed and Windows 8.1 with Bing search. 4GB memory and 500GB sound about right for a laptop at this price level and the low end AMD processor has a Passmark benchmark score of 615 on the day of this review so it is very much a computer for basic things.

Glossy 15.6 inch widescreen HD TruBrite Brightview WLED backlit display with 1366x768 pixel resolution and 16:9 image aspect ratio offers bright screen that is adjustable with reasonable picture quality but the viewing angles are a bit limited due to not having the expensive IPS panel. AMD Radeon HD 8210 is the graphics card that is more or less equivalent to the basic Intel HD graphics and lets you play some of the not so demanding older games and not the current titles- you do need a proper dedicated graphics card as well as a more powerful CPU for that. Sound is reported to be OK through the built-in dual stereo speakers but nothing that impressive- remember this is an entry level low cost laptop and you will hear better sound through headphones. You have an HD webcam with an integrated digital microphone for live chats and still snapshots.

Textured resin in jet black Toshiba looks stylish and weighs 4.85 lbs with measurements of 14.96 x 10.2 x 1.05 inches- slim, lightweight and portable. Manufacturer claims the battery life to be around 5 hours from its 4 cell/32Wh lithium ion battery and naturally this would depend on how you use the machine. It has a standard full-size island style comfortable keyboard with 10-key numeric pad for easy number crunching but we’re not certain how robust the keys are- not cheap but not very premium feeling. The touchpad with multiple gestures seems to work fine but you may be happier with a wireless USB mouse. Bluetooth is not supported by default and you can simply get a cheap USB dongle and connect it to one of the 3 USB ports (2 x USB 2.0 and 1 x USB 3.0). It also has the DVD-SuperMulti drive (+/-R double layer), 802.11b/g/n wireless, 10/100 Ethernet LAN, a Headphone jack (stereo), a Memory Card Reader, an HDMI output, an RGB port and a Security cable lock slot.

Conclusion:Toshiba Satellite C55D-B5319 is an easy to set-up and use budget notebook with acceptable performance levels for simple daily tasks. Sure, many customers would prefer the older Windows 7 to Windows 8 but it is often fine after a few days- takes some getting used to, at least the newer 8.1 version is more user friendly with the familiar Start screen and button. We like that this Toshiba is lightweight and easy to carry around, that the processor TDP is only 9 watts and battery life is around 5 hours and more (is an EPEAT Gold registered and Energy Star qualified machine), that it comes with adequate memory for basic multitasking and spacious hard drive for your multimedia and common files. You have 1 month trials of Norton Anti-virus and Microsoft Office as well as HDD recovery and some useful Toshiba software and you can simply get rid of those you don’t need for faster performance. As long as you don’t have very high expectations, play advanced games or run very demanding software it should do the job for basic tasks- you’re getting what you pay for. It has its flaws due to being a very low cost machine but the customer reviews are more positive than negative- pros seem to outweigh the cons. And it comes with a 1 year standard limited warranty for parts and labour by Toshiba.

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